Why Middle Age Is the Best Time to Fall in Love

We couldn’t have been in love with each other at any other time in our lives — only right now

by Larry Carlat • Next Avenue

Photograph: Shutterstock.com

I’m in love. I’ve been in love before, but not like this.

I constantly tell the woman I’m in love with how beautiful, smart, funny, talented, insightful, sexy and nice she is, as well as many other things that I can’t say here, and she nervously laughs for a moment before kissing me and saying thank you.

“If you told me any of those things a few years ago,” she said a few nights ago, “I wouldn’t have been able to take them in. I probably would’ve run for the hills.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of those things.”

We agreed that we couldn’t have been in love with each other at any other time in our lives except right now, that we’re lucky to have found each other when we did.

It may have taken us a while, but we know who we are and what we’ve been waiting for, and we see it all in each other and that fills us up like nothing has ever done before. I know we’re still in the wild-thing beginning of love, which is always intoxicating and thrilling to the bone. But what’s different for us, something that I’ve never experienced, is a kind of shorthand we share that cuts to an incredible depth of feeling that can only be achieved by people who have, as they say, been around the block. Which is the circuitous way of saying that it rocks to be this old. And that, in a nutshell, is why middle age is the best time to fall in love.